The taste is now beyond the tongue
He is Medina; I, a migrant
This bond is beyond conjecture
I bow down, but only as I wish
My bowing is beyond your threshold
Howsoever hot be the sun
It burns beyond your canopy
A desire for a handful of the earth
Lies beyond the reach of the sky
The very last man of the tribe
Stays beyond the city of mercy
A leaf sits on a naked branch
That’s beyond the desire of autumn
None would consider Khursheed his own
He stays beyond both the worlds
64
Zeeshan SahilZeeshan Sahil
Zeeshan Sahil, (1961–2008) was born in Hyderabad, Sind. He received his education there and in Karachi, where he lived a rather short life of forty-seven years, owing to physical deformity and illness. He worked as a columnist for Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation and briefly remained associated with the National Book Council of Pakistan.
Sahil was a poet of remarkable resilience in terms of his experiential capital and its unassuming rendition. He held a prominent place among the postmodernist poets of Pakistan. Drawing upon a broader realm of experiences, he evolved a kind of diction that could explore the socio-political conditions of his times in both allusive and direct terms. This enabled him to depict sundry images and make statements that were direct and precise in spite of being referential. Sahil formulated a unique discourse in his poetry as he authenticated the prose poem and moved from the mundane to the reflective. His collections, Arena, Chidiyon Ka Shore, Kuhr Aalood Aasman Ke Sitare, Karachi Aur Doosri Nazmein, Shabnaama Aur Doosri Nazmein, and Email Aur Doosri Nazmein, Jung Ke Dinon Mein and Neem Tareek Mohabbat bear testimony to the vitality of his all-inclusive imagination.
1
Yaad karne ke zamaane se bahut aage hain
Aaj hum apne thikaane se bahut aage hain
Koee aa kar hamein dhoondega to kho jaaega
Hum naye gham mein puraane se bahut aage hain
Jism baaqi hai magar jaan ko mitaane waale
Rooh mein zakhm nishaane se bahut aage hain
Is qadar khush hain ke hum khwab-e-faraamoshi mein
Jaag jaane ke bahaane se bahut aage hain
Jo hamein paa ke bhi khone se bahut peechhe tha
Hum use kho ke bhi paane se bahut aage hain
1
I am far beyond the age of recalling
Far beyond my abode today, far beyond
Whosoever comes to look for me will now get lost
In new sorrows, I’m far beyond the old ones, far beyond
The body lives on but the plunderers of my soul should know
Wounds in the soul are far beyond the targets, far beyond
Happy, I’m so happy, in the dreams of forgetfulness
I’m far beyond the pleas of waking up, far beyond
One who was far behind in losing even in finding me
In losing her, I’m far beyond in finding, far beyond
2
Yoon boli thi chidiya khaali kamre mein
Har pal mera rasta dekha karta hai
Jaane kis ka saaya khaali kamre mein
Khidki ke raste se laaya karta hoon
Main baahar ki dunya khaali kamre mein
Har mausam mein aate jaate rehte hain
Log hawa aur darya khaali kamre mein
Chehron ke jungle se lekar aaya hoon
Surkh gulaab ka pauda khaali kamre mein
Basti mein har raat nikalne waala chaand
‘Umr hui na utra khaali kamre mein
Tez hawaa mein saare kooze toot gaye
Aur phaila ek sehra khaali kamre mein
Sahil shahr se door akela rehta hai
Jaise main hoon rehta khaali kamre mein
2
So spoke a bird in the empty room
As if there was none in the empty room
I wonder whose shadow in the empty room
Waits for me, every moment, in the empty room
I bring inside the world spread outside
Through my window in the empty room
They keep coming, going, every season
People, wind, river, in the empty room
I have brought in from the jungle of faces
A plant of red roses in the empty room
That moon showing up in the village every night
Ages now, it hasn’t shown up in the empty room
Earthen pots broke to pieces in the howling wind
Then spread a wilderness in the empty room
The shore lives all alone, far from the city
As I live all alone in the empty room
65
Aftab Husain
Aftab Husain (1962–) is a Pakistan-born and Austria-based poet who writes in both Urdu and English. He completed his doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Vienna, Austria, where he currently teaches courses on south Asian literature and culture. He has two collections of poetry in English—both were published in Vienna along with their German translations. His poems have been translated into French, Italian, Serbian, Arabic and Persian. He himself translates German poetry into Urdu and vice versa. Aftab Husain co-edits a German/English bilingual magazine Words & World, that highlights migrant literature from Vienna, Austria and writes in Pakistani–English newspapers on the issues of literary culture.
Aftab Husain writes metric and non-metric poems as well as ghazals. To his Urdu readers, however, he is distinguished for his ghazals that have received critical as well as popular acclaim. His ghazals are marked by a certain waywardness of thought and an offbeat twist of inferences that he manages to control with his mastery over language. His lines, although almost prosaic in syntax, are chiselled in the precision of their euphonic diction. Writing across a wide thematic spectrum, the poetry of Aftab Husain leaves a lot unsaid, which renders to his ghazals a poly-vocal postmodern significance. He has published one collection of his poems titled Matla.
1
Jidhar nigaah karoon ek naya samundar hai
Ye khwaab hai ke koee khwaab ka samundar hai
Nazar uthhaaoon to haibat se kaanp jaata hoon
Wo husn hai ke bipharta hua samundar hai
Main us ko aankh mein bhar loon ke us mein doob maroon
Ye mere saamne gehra khula samundar hai
So main hoon aur koee goonjta samundar hai
Wo yaad dil mein dar aai hai aur khula mujh per
Samundaron se ulajhti hawa samundar hai
Jo paar utarna hi thehra to koee farq naheen
Ke meri raah mein dunya hai yaa samundar hai
1
Wherever I see, I see a new sea
Is that a sea of dreams, or a dream of a sea
When I look up, I just shudder with fright
Is that a beauty, or a fuming sea
Shall I preserve her in my eyes, or perish in her
There lies before me a deep, an open sea
Each act of hers sailed me afar last night
So this is me, that a resounding sea
With her memory in my heart, I know now
The wind confronting the sea is but a sea
I’ve to sail through and arrive; doesn’t matter
What lies on my way—the world, or the sea
2
Rok sakta tha kisee ko main magar jaane diya
Mujh mein koee mar raha tha main magar jaane diya
Khwaab tha aankhon mein meri, main ne aankhein khol deen
Aur us khushboo ko saare mein bikhar jaane diya
Rafta rafa dil ko dunya ki hawaa raas aa gaee
Rafta rafta hum ne apna zakhm bhar jaane diya
Aur ab wo log meri raah ki deewaar hain
Jin ko main ne apne ander se guzar jaane diya
Shaam koee di
l se ho kar jaa raha tha Aftab
Hum ne dekha ek nazar aur dekh kar jaane diya
2
I could have stopped someone, I let that someone go
Someone was dying in me, I let that someone die
There was a dream in my eyes, I just opened my eyes
And that fragrance around, I let the fragrance spread
Only by and by, my heart got used to the world’s ways
And only by and by, I also let my wounds heal
And now they—only they stand like walls in my way
For whom I made a way through my heart, I let them go
Last evening someone passed through the alleys of my heart
I saw that someone, Aftab, I let that someone leave
Notes
1 Suggested by the etymology of the word.
2 See Rahman’s preface for comprehensive details.
3 Here, the role of the late Indian and Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali and books like Ghazals of Ghalib, edited by Aijaz Ahmad, which contained ghazal-inspired ‘transcreations’ by W.S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich, Mark Strand and others, has to be stressed. In his preface, Rahman also lists a number of major anglophone poets who have adopted or adapted the ghazal form.
4 If purists complain and point out that Urdu came into being only in the eighteenth century, they ought to be made to read Vali Deccani: his language can be more easily understood by ordinary speakers of Urdu today than Chaucer’s English can be understood by contemporary speakers of English! (See Rahman’s note under ‘Metaphysical Beginnings’ too.)
1 Some parts of this preface are drawn from my essay ‘On Translating a Form: The Possible/Impossible Ghazal in English’, Translation: Poetics and Practice, New Delhi: Creative Books, 2002.
2 The golden odes, or mu’allaqaat, are supposed to be the earliest specimens of Arabic poetry. They acquired such popularity that they were inscribed in letters of gold on pieces of linen to be suspended (as the word mu’allaq suggests) on the walls of the Kaaba in Mecca as masterpieces of poetic art. Seven such odes by Imru al-Qais, Tarafah, Zuhayr, Labid, Antara, Amr ibn Kulthum and al-Harith are supposed to have been grouped together by Hammad ar-Rawiyah, who collected the early Arab poetry in the eighth century.
3 Ghazals are also said to have been composed, for curiosity’s sake, in several other languages like Bosnian, Esperanto, Norwegian, Pashto, Polish, Rumanian, Russian, Swedish and Ukranian.
4 Adrienne Rich, along with W.S. Merwin, Wlliam Stafford, David Ray, Thomas Fitzsimmons, Mark Strand and William Hunt, was introduced to ghazal and its major practitioner, Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, by Aijaz Ahmad who gave them the literal translations of some of Ghalib’s ghazals, along with explanatory notes. They, in turn, composed their own ‘versions’ of the poet. See Ghazals of Ghalib, New York: Columbia University Press, 1971.
5 Adrienne Rich, Collected Early Poems: 1950-1970, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993, p. 426. (Leaflets and The Will to Change, published in 1969 and 1971 respectively, are included in Collected Early Poems).
6 ‘Notes on the Ghazals’, Jim Harrison, Outlyer and Ghazals, New York: Simon Schuster, 1969, p. 26.
7 Still Jack, Toronto: Anansi Press, 1978, p. 5.
8 ‘Preface’, Sunday Water: Thirteen Anti Ghazals, Victoria: Morris Printing Company Limited, 1982.
9 Anisur Rahman, ‘In a Thick and Rich Soil for Writers: An Interview with Douglas Barbour’, Odyssey, Vol. V and VI, 2004, p. 6.
10 Agha Shahid Ali, (ed.), Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English, Hanover: University Press of New England, Wesleyan University Press, p, 1.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
Urdu and the Ghazal
The Urdu ghazal is a major repository of cultural signifiers usually and largely associated with Muslims in India. Over a period of more than five centuries, it has grown and developed across the country as the most popular poetic form. Justifiably, the history of this quintessential form of poetry is also the history of the development of Urdu as a language of literary expression. In spite of the frequent debates regarding the lack of patronage to this language, its unsteady survival in its own habitats, and the linguistic mapping of more or less viable languages, the Urdu language has retained its place in the socio-cultural matrix of India, precisely because the ghazal has stood it in good stead and has ensured it a life along with other languages of India. Hence, there is a need to put this remarkable tradition of the Urdu ghazal across a larger readership in the English language for all its veracity and variety.
This Collection
I have tried to put together a comprehensive collection of Urdu ghazals from its very beginnings in the late sixteenth century to the present times. I have identified seven literary periods and selected sixty-five poets to create a historical perspective and to show the development of this poetic form, in both India and Pakistan. A detailed account of the pretext, text, and context of the ghazal in general, and the Urdu ghazal in particular, is presented at the beginning to create a larger perspective on the form. This is followed by a critical introduction to each period and the selected poets who made their mark and stayed on to be a part of the larger canon. All these are supplementary efforts to make way for the reader to reach the ghazals in English translation. This collection aspires to serve as a point of reference to mark the best ghazals written through ages, and also to show how the ghazal stands out as a literary form to which there is no other approximate form in any other language.
Methodology of Translation
Translating the ghazal has been a different kind of experience for me, compared with my earlier experience of translating the Urdu nazm, or the regular poem. It has been a matter of approximating a form and meeting the attendant demands that it made in the process. As such, I have tried to retain the formal structure of the ghazal comprising a set of shers. Considering the ghazal as a macrocosm and the sher as a microcosm, I have tried to retain the remarkable precision of each sher by finding space for all the units of ideas by evolving a pattern of punctuation which is sometimes in contravention of the standard practice of punctuation. I have done this to ease the tension of ideas and also to control the line length which, in turn, is regulated, as far as possible, by a uniform number of syllables used in a line. This is further modulated by words of similar length in most cases. I have practised this to help the reader appreciate the precision of each couplet and also to help him apprehend the internal rhythm of the composition. Much that I have tried to do is, to a considerable extent, conditioned by the need to create a design of possible meaning in a structure of rhythm and end rhymes which characterizes the ghazal as a poetic composition.
An End Note
It must also be mentioned at the end that the idea and the experience of ‘love‘ in the ghazal tradition is based on a liberal understanding of life, both in romantic and divine terms. This implies that the addressee who might appear to be a female figure may not be necessarily so but also a figure of the divine kind. The neutrality of gender and the interchangeability of the male, female, and the divine is what makes the ghazal a complex site for the negotiation of meaning. While translating the ghazals, I have tried to identify this figure as a female in a traditional manner but it could be equally possible to identify the same one as a male figure, or a divine being. This mutability underlines the unique tradition of ghazal which projects the profane and the pious, the secular and the sacred, the plebeian and the patrician in a complex web of human associations with diverse manifestations of life and the possible meanings associated with them.
Putting together this volume has been a prolonged affair of love undertaken with some pain, some perseverance, and some patience but always with pleasure.
Anisur Rahman
SHUKRIYA
The idea of putting together the best of Urdu ghazals from the very beginnings to the present times in a single comprehensive volume of its own kind was appreciated and endorsed by many poets, possible readers and translators. They joined hands with me and hel
ped me to put together this volume.
Thanks are due in particular to:
Rekhta Foundation website www.rekhta.org for the material accessed, as required.
Shamim Hanfi, Farhat Ehsas, Safdar Imam Quadri and Kauser Mazhari for helping me with the selection of poets and their ghazals.
Keki N. Daruwalla, Tabish Khair, Debjani Chatterjee, Janet Wilson, K. Satchidanandan, H. Masud Taj and Smita Agarwal for reading the translations and offering their suggestions.
Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri for his support.
Sohini Basak, my editor at HarperColllins and a poet in her own right, for making the book as it is.
Tabassum, Yasser, Munazzah, Tabrez, Maria, Mati and Obaid for sustaining me all through, as always, and Rabee for keeping me spirited in many ways.
*
The translator and publisher gratefully acknowledge the kind permission granted by the poets, or their publishers, to include their ghazals in this anthology. All efforts have been made to contact and seek permission from them to include their work in this collection. The publishers will, however, be pleased to make amends in case of inadvertent omissions, as the case may be.
About the Book
The ghazal is a literary curiosity, a quintessential form of poetic expression known for its infectious appeal. This volume brings you the first ever comprehensive collection of Urdu ghazals from its very beginnings in the late sixteenth century to the present times. Sixty-five poets from seven literary periods and diverse locations come together in this collection to showcase a rich fare of ideas and styles. Together, they represent the secular and the sacred, the pious and the profane, the plebeian and the patrician in manners as diverse as life itself.
Here is an ever-moving kaleidoscope of the Urdu ghazal that authenticates the literary form. The volume is made richer with the inclusion of the Roman transliteration of the originals in Urdu alongside their English translations.
About the Author
ANISUR RAHMAN, formerly a professor at the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, a central university in New Delhi, is currently senior advisor at Rekhta Foundation, the world’s largest website on Urdu language, literature and culture: www.rekhta.org.